A developmental dialectical approach to understanding and working with lower and middle class damaged parents--those identified as abusive and neglectful--has specific features and implications. The approach suggests that (1) the personality characteristics and interpersonal relations of parents are inseparable from their social conditions; (2) characteristics of adequate and damaged parents of lower and middle classes are both product and contributor to the social and material conditions of their classes; (3) poor parents' powerlessness and external locus of control reflects contradictions resulting from the interpenetration of social and psychological structures; and (4) the middle class's internal locus of control is as far from (or as close to) reality as the poor's external locus of control. Dialectics' affirmation of the integrity of levels of systems suggests that all generalizations about social status cannot substitute for knowing the individual and that development and change ensue from contradictions inherent within and between systems. Intervention with low-power-position damaged parents involves clarifying their personal and social victimization. For middle class parents, too, intervention involves clarification of personal victimization and social pressures involved in maintaining social status. Team work, group therapy, and parent support groups should be the contexts of work with damaged parents; therapists should be supportive and affirmative. While healing might be slow and incremental, enough quantitative change will result in a qualitative difference in the parent. (RH)

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